Data accounts for up to 75 percent of value in half of businesses

March 30th, 2013

As the volume of data stored in the enterprise continues to grow, organizations see this information as representing a substantial portion of their assets. With tools such as Hadoop for Windows, businesses are unlocking the value of this data, Anthony Saxby, Microsoft U.K.'s data platform product marketing manager, said in a recent talk at Computing's Big Data Summit 2013. According to Microsoft's research, half of all organizations think their data represents 50 to 75 percent of their total value.

The challenge in unlocking this value is technology, Saxby said, according to Computing. Much of this information is internally siloed or separated from the external data sources that it could be combined with to create more effective, monetized results. Today's businesses want to bring together unstructured and structured data to create new insights. With tools such as Hadoop, this type of analysis is increasingly possible. For instance, record label EMI uses a variety of data types across 25 countries to determine how to market music artists in different geographies.

According to InformationWeek's State of Storage 2013 study, 42 percent of North American organizations now have 100 terabytes or more of data under active management, and 11 percent manage more than 1 petabyte. Enterprises show no signs of slowing their data acquisition either. This past year, the share of companies with annual data growth of 25 percent or more was at its highest level in five years at 30 percent.

As organizations look to turn this information into an asset, having the ability to handle it and turn it into actionable insights will be critical, Saxby said. The goal of Hadoop and big data is to reduce decision making time and help companies innovate at a faster speed, more immediately seizing upon the value of the data they have in storage.